Thursday, November 1, 2018

Life and Science

The out-of-control proliferation and use of weapons of mass
destruction is perhaps the worst of contemporary science’s tragic fruits, but
there are others. The misuse and abuse of science to justify destroying the
Earth’s habitability has also become a source of widespread anxiety.

These and other perils have a common root: the corruption of
Big Science by Big Money. More precisely, they are the consequence of a
profit-driven economic system that hamstrings humanity’s ability to make
rational economic decisions.

Science is presumed to be a reliable source of knowledge
based on objective fact rather than subjective bias. By definition, that
requires research to be conducted impartially by scientists with no conflicts
of interest that could affect their judgment. But a science harnessed to the
maximization of private profits cannot avoid material conflicts of interest
that are anathema to objectivity.

– Cliff Conner

*

“Historical capitalism
is not only a social formation but an ontological one.”

– Jason W. Moore

The above extract is from an
article in Climate and Capitalism,
by Cliff Conner, the Marxist author of A
People’s History of Science. The rest of the article goes on to unpack the
implications and explications of this premise: that something called science is
a mighty and productive tool for the good of humanity that has been perverted
by the venal pursuit of profit that lies at the heart of capitalist political
economy. The key words here are “misuse and abuse,” which exonerates “science”
and indicts capitalism.

I’m always quite keen to indict capitalism; and I’m more than
a little sympathetic to some form of ecosocialism (the raison d’etre of Climate and Capitalism).
Capitalism is horrifically and inherently destructive of the material bases of
our existence, as well as being horrifically and inescapably unjust. But Conner’s
essentially polemical account of “science” here does not square with history,
and it doesn’t stand up to philosophical scrutiny either. If the left wants to
get past its limitations, it has to be willing to play outside the Marxist
sandbox—a useful and intellectually generative box I played in for quite some
time.

As a Marxist in my past life, I never experienced what felt
like a credible challenge from liberalism; but the entire Marxist conceptual
edifice is constructed on the same ontological ground as liberalism, and where
I discovered gaps and vulnerabilities in both Marxism and “science” was through
post-Marxists like Carolyn Merchant who began to question precisely this
ontology. Engels distinguished the work of himself and his German collaborator
by naming its political expression “scientific socialism.” This new ontology,
shared by liberals and many Marxists, the (masculinist) basis of modernity, is
the subject-object duality (extrapolated as a culture-nature dualism) articulated
first by Descartes.

This ontological rift is the symbolic expression of the
separation of the direct producers from the means of production. Together,
these moments constituted the origins of capitalism not only as world-system
but as ontological formation: as a world-ecology. Humanity/ Nature is a doubly
‘violent’ abstraction: violent in its analytical removal of strategic relations
of historical change, but also practically violent in enabling capitalism’s
world-historical praxis – a praxis of cheapening the lives and work of many
humans and most non-human natures. This is a praxis of domination and
alienation operative simultaneously through the structures of capital,
knowledge and feeling. Humanity/Nature is consequently not only violently but
practically abstract. These are real abstractions: abstractions that work in
the world because we see and act if Humanity/Nature are given conditions of
reality rather than historically constructed.

– Jason W. Moore

Science—as it is now understood—is not simply a method of inquiry. It begins through its
own instrumentation, which is not a morally neutral reality, and proceeds via a
set of premises that proscriptively separate humans from a fetish called “Nature,”
by rendering non-human natures passive and inert through clockwork determinism.
Merchant, the feminist historian, in trying to discern the history of science,
discovered and described how the so-called fathers of the Enlightenment took a
nature that was still “alive,” and killed it. Her canonical work is entitled,
appropriately, The Death of Nature. But
before we examine the historic instrumentation and the original telos of the scientific enterprise to determine
the accuracy of Conner’s polemic, we have to revise the popular as well as
scientific understanding of another fetish—life.

In scientific terms, Wikipedia tells us life is “the
current definition is that organisms are open systems that maintain
homeostasis, are composed of cells, have a life cycle, undergo
metabolism, can grow, adapt to their environment, respond to stimuli, reproduce
and evolve.” Biologists themselves admit, however, that there is—in a reality
that does not conform to ideas—no “bright line” between some phenomena that are
“alive” and others that are kind of. .
. mmmm, dunno. Self-replicating proteins? Alive? No?

Knowledge is not a simple mental mirror of what is.
Knowledge is not fixed and permanent. We no longer “know” our bodies through
humors, or “know” the stars through celestial spheres. Half of all scientific
knowledge today will likely be considered somehow wrong in forty-five years. We
know things in different times and places in a particular way, knowledges that
are a less than stable potpourri of history, practical experience, cultural
norms, social “roles,” language complexities, etc. The challenge of genealogical approaches to the history of
knowledge (taken up by postmodernists) to the post-Enlightenment hegemony of
more encyclopedic account of
knowledge, predominating from the sixteenth century on, was its attention to
the dynamics of consciousness at the mysterious interface between “reality” and
“consciousness.” Phenomenology laid bare the inescapability of the very
subjectivity that the Cartesian post-Enlightenment epoch claimed to have
transcended. Even now, for most of us who are not engaged in scientific inquiry
24-7, it is an “intellectually arduous task” to set aside our confidence in the
“objectivist” episteme that grows directly from the subject-object duality that
Descartes foisted on us during the emergence of capitalist modernity (Descartes
lived in the Dutch Republic, arguably the first genuinely capitalist
nation-state). This lengthy excursus is to say, “life” has not always been Life.

Life, as we now use the term fetishistically—the abstraction,
LIFE—did not exist prior to Homo economicus
and the ascendance of Baconian science. There was no word in the pagan world
for it—bios meant something akin to
one’s destiny in Greek. What the Hebrews did to universalize life was not define an abstraction, but
to make life an articulation of God’s breath
(spirit meant breath), shared throughout a creation that was itself a unitary
matrix understood, as it has been by most pre-modern cultures, as a great womb.

Even in the Aramaic used by Jesus and his Judean cohort, the
term abwoon—translated subsequently to
mean simply father—meant something
more akin to “birth-giver” . . . like a womb. The vitality of the universe
remained unquestioned, and there was no existent perception of “life” as a
property possessed by a particular creature.
What emerged with capitalist modernity—and science, its conjoined twin, which created
the conditions for life-the-abstracted-property, was the modern idea of . . .
property, and with it, a proprietary individual—the very basis of capitalist
political economy. Ivan Illich wrote in 1994:

The ideology of possessive individualism progressively
affected the way life could be talked about as a property. Since the 19th
century, the legal construction of society increasingly reflects a new
philosophical radicalism in the perception of the self. The result is a break
with the ethics which had informed western history since Greek antiquity,
clearly expressed by the shift of concern from the good to values. Society is
now organized on the utilitarian assumption that man (sic) is born needy, and
needed values are by definition scarce. It becomes axiomatic that the
possession of life is then interpreted as the supreme value. Homo economicus
becomes the referent for ethical reflection. Living is equated with a struggle
for survival or, more radically, with a competition for life. For over a
century now it has become customary to speak about the "conservation of
life" as the ultimate motive of human action and social organization.

This recapitulation about life is preface to grasping
Merchant’s metaphor in The Death of
Nature, because she is not saying nature “possessed” the property of life;
she is saying that the pre-capitalist perception of the universe as a vital
matrix, very like a womb, was effaced by Baconian science, a philosophic move
that could not have been accomplished without the accompaniment of the Cartesian
separation of Man-the-subject and Nature-the-object. Nature became a thing when Nature became a thing apart—the
object of domination by Man (and they meant males
in this case).

Bacon himself boasted that his project was the outworking of
the human “domination of nature” expressed in Genesis, unaware of how his own episteme was so alien to that of
the authors of Genesis, that this
comparison was between a steam boiler and a womb.

There was no doubt that the Hebrew account of creation was
organized hierarchically, and that humans had been granted authority within those
hierarchies as stewards of a creation that belonged always and ultimately to
God. But all creation had God’s vitality. Mountains will occasionally leap.

In a very real sense, one might say that Bacon, in trying to
fulfill his interpretation of Genesis,
actually reproduced the sin of the original couple—trying to become omniscient
and omnipotent like God.

Bacon was a lawyer for the Tudor Court and an enthusiastic
witch-hunter, in addition to his natural science pursuits.

This critique of life-the-property also goes to the heart of
the whole pro-life/pro-choice polemic that agrees, if on nothing else, that life
is this property (as defined
scientifically), though they diverge decisively on when an actual unborn human
life qualifies for the protections of citizenship.

Prior to the invention of the fetus, a life (not Life) was
not signaled by an event that required instrumentation (medical “tests”) to
discern. The real “beginning” was the quickening, that first sensation of the
baby “kicking” in the womb. Since the appearance of the fetus (now also a
polemical term for the denial of
citizenship to the unborn), given that every pregnancy progresses at its own particular
rates within normal limits, the legal difficulty of determining when an abortion is or is not a
violation of the “rights” of citizenship is resolved by mapping. Time is
subdued by space, divided onto a calendar; and the process is subordinated to
arbitrary periods, or trimesters, that roughly correspond to the ability of a
prematurely born infant to survive outside the womb—and this marker has
likewise been determined by the instrumentation
of medical intervention.

So what about instrumentation? I write this with an instrument.
I wear reading glasses to do it, another instrument. What instruments facilitated
the rise of the hegemony of Cartesian science? Well, it might have begun with
those maps, and the instruments of mapping. Literally. The beginnings of
private property, as it is today understood, as well as the colonial conquests
upon which capitalism developed, required surveying and cartography. Always the
maps, eh?

Cartography combined with shipbuilding to give conquerors
range. Shipbuilding and weapons construction, in turn, required huge inputs of
resources and fuels. Some merchant ships had main masts that exceeded 175 feet
in height, requiring a single tree with enough mass that the wrights could acquire
that length in a straight line with the girth and composition to survive high
winds. Forests were cleared until the British landscape had become denuded, not
just for lumber but for the fuel to make iron cannons. Competitors cleared
forests all the way into Norway and Poland.

The development of new instruments for conquest and
expansion, then, predates Baconian science, because that new practice was an
attempt to improve the technics of war
and conquest for profit, using a paradigm familiar to the lawyer Bacon
himself—the trial.

Comparing nature to an irascible woman, Bacon described the
scientific enterprise as an interrogation to rip away her secrets and plunder
her treasures. Seldom realized now, the peak period of the the European witch
hunts was not Late Medieval, but early Enlightenment; and Bacon was ardent in
the prosecution of witches, which was preceded by interrogations, often using the
instruments of torture to reveal her truths.

The instruments of
science, from the very beginning, were not designed pursuant to a modern
hallucination like “pure science,” but precisely and specifically for profit and
war . . . a history that appears inconvenient to Conner and other eco-Marxists
making the erroneous claims above, like “a science harnessed to the
maximization of private profits cannot avoid material conflicts of interest
that are anathema to objectivity.”

The illusion of this “objectivity” is precisely what was
necessary to prosecute the colonial capitalist enterprise. Without this
conceptual firewall, the rapacious speed with which capitalists transformed the
earth’s landscapes could not have happened. One term that Bacon used to
describe the witch-interrogation of (feminized) Nature was extraction. We will extract
her secrets and plunder her riches.

After Descartes, the stewardship that defined that archaic
Hebrew “domination” of nature disappeared with along with Nature’s vitality.
Afterward, there was only property.

Even many socialists still see “society” (read:
subject/culture/human) in this separate and proprietary way. The laudable focus
of socialists on justice—taken not just as fair-play, but also through the
surviving Christian idiom that every human alive has some foundational equality
with all others (each equally precious in God’s sight)—has apprehended the
fetishization of the commodity, but left on the loose the fetishization of life and of instruments. It’s only climate crisis—with its terrifying shadow
now stretching over the world—that has shaken us out of our torpor and nudged
us to re-examine that Cartesian ontology.

Overcoming liberalism was nothing compared to what
overcoming Science-the-Idol will be.